New Irish venture Reverbeo selected for Start-up Chile programme

Brian Finnerty and Robert O'Shaughnessy, co-founders of Reverbeo, pictured at the NDRC in Dublin

Irish start-up Reverbeo, which has come up with a translation management system for websites, has been picked from a poll of global start-ups to take part in the Start-up Chile accelerator programme for six months, starting from July.

The company, which Robert O’Shaughnessy and Brian Finnerty set up nine months ago, was picked from a pool of 1,577 applications to take part in the accelerator programme, along with 99 other start-ups from 28 countries.

Reverbeo is pioneering a cloud-based solution that automatically creates a multilingual version of any website. Its tool is currently in beta mode.

Start-up Chile is an initiative of the Chilean government that seeks out early-stage, high-potential entrepreneurs to bootstrap their start-ups in Chile.

Reverbeo is now set to obtain US$40,000 of seed capital from Start-up Chile. O’Shaughnessy said this funding will bring to €100,000 in seed funding the start-up has raised from the accelerator, along with the NDRC and Enterprise Ireland. The company took part in the NDRC’s LaunchPad programme in 2012.

In July, O’Shaughnessy and Finnerty will temporarily relocate to Chile to participate in the six-month programme. With the seed funding, they are hoping to set up a sales office in South America.

In addition, Reverbeo has this week been announced as one of 12 finalists for the InnoPitch European Young Innovators Award, which will take place in Brussels in early June.

At this event, the company will participate in a mentoring workshop with the seed investor Carlos Eduardo Espinal from Seedcamp, the micro seed fund for tech start-ups, O’Shaughnessy said.

He added that it has been a great week of announcements for the start-up.

"Building a product from scratch is a long and slow process and positive industry feedback like this is the perfect motivation to keep pushing forward," he said.